Seattle PD chief to resign after budget cuts
Carmen Best, Seattle’s first Black police chief, announced she is stepping down Monday after a city council vote approved cutting the budget by nearly $4 million and reducing the department by as many as 100 officers.
Best said she will retire Sept. 2 after more than 28 years on the force in a letter to the department also published by the Seattle Times. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, who picked
Best to lead the department in 2018, appointed Deputy Chief Adrian
Diaz as interim chief, KING-TV reported.
“I am confident the department will make it through these difficult times,” Best wrote in the letter. “You truly are the best police department in the country, and please trust me when I say, the vast majority of people in Seattle support you and appreciate you.”
Durkan said she she accepted Best’s decision “with a very heavy heart” in an email to police.
“I regret deeply that she concluded that the best way to serve the city and help the department was a change in leadership, in the hope that would change the dynamics to move forward with the City Council,” Durkan wrote.
The measures would cut less than $4 million of the department’s more than $400 million annual budget this year and reduce the department’s 1,400 police force by 100 through layoffs and attrition. Best’s roughly $285,000 annual salary and the pay of other top police leaders also will be cut, and officers will be taken off a team that removes homeless camps.
The reductions fell far short of the 50% cut to the department that many Black Lives Matter protesters have demanded.
The cuts to the department come after thousands of demonstrators marched in Seattle’s streets after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Protests have criticized the department’s use of tear gas and other crowd control methods and marched to her home and to Durkan’s home.